Comment by ThrowawayR2
6 hours ago
> "Is it all the layoffs? The suddenly shaky economics for a lot of our companies? The uncertainty of the career's future in general?"
I'd say that those make up the majority of it. During the dotcom bust, there were waves of bankruptcies and layoffs, tech stock valuations crashing and staying stagnant, and people struggling to find jobs for months, etc. too and there was industry-wide doom and gloom and pundits proclaiming that software was no longer worth getting into. So all this angst seems very familiar. People would probably not be as bothered about AI if the the career outlook was positive.
For the last 2 years the frontier labs have been taking on funding at valuations that can only be justified if they replace vast swathes of human labor (and they have been pretty successful so far at automating large parts of software jobs, if not the jobs themselves yet), so the career doom and gloom is justified.